Shoveling through the work, normal stuff like blown plugs and such. Now I'm working on an odd one: This is a clean Titan board from China. Shuts down controller, but pins 4,6,8 are ok. So I check pins 1,3,5,7,9 and find that pins 1,3,5 and 9 are way off (blown drivers, both of them) and 7 is like 100 ohms (scl for the LM75 and Eeprom and power supplies). Really weird, what the heck happened to this thing.

So I pulled the drivers, replaced, pin 7 is still low (it should be 6k). Pin 2 is ok (SCK) so I am wondering what is up. Use my heat trick and see that power supply 3 is changing the resistance, so I pull it. Now up to 2k, but the board still doesn't respond when plugged in. With no power and the 10 pin hooked up I don't see the EEPROM or LM75 and if I put 12v on it the controller stalls (good indication of a power supply problem).

Weird. Never seen two supplies go out together. I'll lift a few partially and see if I can isolate it.

Never dull in repair land.

So what are the betting odds for Bitcoin Trash to fail?

Ah ok, so this is not a fork of Bitcoin with a single tweak, this is a completely new coin a-la catcoin.

*munches on popcorn* Thank you.

C

Thank you. Back from the con, going over to the PO this morning, got a lot of packages there to work on . Should have the backlog cleared in a few days, will post a status update.

C

Question: If BCC forks tomorrow then it will have the same difficulty height as the rest of bitcon, correct?

If so then why would it not be a vapor lock? If it's only worth 200 a coin, few miners would mine it (doing so means losing out on the reward from bitcoin chain) thus if 1/16th of the miners mined BCC it would take um... 32 weeks for the difficulty to reset along with transaction confirm times of 8 hours per block found. At best.

This sounds like a complete fail out of the box. What am I missing?

I disagree. Run Titans at 60mh per cube and they will run pretty much forever. The errors came when people ran the things at 80mh, which caused:

1) Dies to fail from too much heat. I have seen boards with burn marks on the back.

2) Power supplies running too hot. Once again have seen supplies with caps and FETs that caught fire.

3) FPGAs on the controller blowing up: This is caused partially by a crap design, part because people unplug the miners from the controller while running.

4) Removing and replacing the heat sink without new thermal compound (it's a one time use).

5) Running miners in barns, sheds, and places where either there is not enough cool air or there is literally horse crap everywhere (oh yes, I have had to clean those miners....)

6) Torquing the bolts so tightly the board tacos (this can be addressed by putting one of those rubberish thingies under the board between the front two posts).

7) PCIe power plugs burning due to crappy power supply cables or running too hot (don't use a little supply with cheap wires. Bad)

They weren't the best miners in the universe, but they weren't too bad. With the exception of 3 (and that's a biggie, using fucking optoisolators would have made everything ok) they're pretty good at 60mh, <42c on the die, under 70c on the supplies. Exceed that and things get more complex.

YMMV.

Well I did get a blown S7 in here to fix at Lightfoot labs, so I am learning these things. Once I get the board running I'll post results and thoughts in a thread. I can almost always do turnaround in a few days, never months :-)

C

Well I'm here at Defcon taking a bit of a break. You can find me pretty easily, I have a mining board instead of a badge around my neck. Feel free to say hi, already have met a few people here.

I'm going to go down to the Hacking village on Friday and see if they would like me to do a talk. I've brought the bag of tricks with me, so I could do a presentation on how to spot and fix some common issues on bitcoin mining gear and how to figure out what's what. If so I'll probably do it Saturday, will check.

Anyone else here and want to hit a bitcoin machine for the hell of it?

C

Here, meeting people, cool. I'm easy to spot, look for the guy with a bitcoin miner for a badge....

Well I'm here at Defcon taking a bit of a break. You can find me pretty easily, I have a mining board instead of a badge around my neck. Feel free to say hi, already have met a few people here.

I'm going to go down to the Hacking village on Friday and see if they would like me to do a talk. I've brought the bag of tricks with me, so I could do a presentation on how to spot and fix some common issues on bitcoin mining gear and how to figure out what's what. If so I'll probably do it Saturday, will check.

Anyone else here and want to hit a bitcoin machine for the hell of it?

C

Holy shit i am drunk in vegas. How is everything going?

But but bitcoin.com will only support it. Subsidize that dude's crappy plastic ride. :-)

More to the point, more opportunities to buy. Hopefully the ltc-btc will spread a bit, I've got some litecoin on my phone here.

You're using :8332 on that URL, right? As I said, I'll take a look at this next week when I get back from DefCon, not too interested in logging into my central network systems from a very compromised city....

C

Eh, probably paid too much for it. Besides I prefer Porsches.

So what major assets does bitcoin.com control? Other than a $40 domain name?

Oi.

I'll give it a shot when I get back to the office after Defcon (speaking of which I am bringing the bag of tricks and might be giving a talk at the Hardware Hacking Village on how to hack miners). It's possible KNC didn't compile in support for solo mining on the Pi version, but I believe I included it on the BeagleBone version.

Not too big a deal; I run a full Litecoin node alongside a bitcoin node so it should be simple to test.

C

Trust me I know your pain: Last summer I was buying gold at 1oz=2btc. This year I'm buying sports cars at 1 car=2btc.

I'll probably feel as stupid next year about this year's buy as I do about last year's buys. :-)

C

And yet they are still profitable. Best run for miner hw i have seen.

Hopefully they made money from the people who jumped in on the pre-buy....

It's not the ASIC per se, you just have to log into the Rpi (or BBB if you are running my more cool code) and set up bfgminer.conf manually. You know how to do it on GPUs, do the same thing at the command line and fire it up.

It's just bfgminer.

C